The story
In May 1962, weeks before Algeria won its independence, more than 300 paintings were taken quietly out of this museum under military escort and shipped to the Louvre in Paris. French authorities feared unrest, and a statue in the collection had already been bombed. Works by Monet, Delacroix and Courbet left the country.
The new Algerian state wanted them back, and over the following years most of the European collection returned to Algiers in one of the first large restitutions of the postcolonial era. The museum reopened as a national institution.
Today it is one of the largest art museums in Africa, set on a hillside above the Jardin d'Essai, the lush botanical garden of Algiers. Inside you can walk from French 19th-century painting to Algerian and Orientalist work, much of it the very canvases that once made the round trip to Paris and home again.
